2/19th Special Weapons Group Barracks
Restricted Area - Western Germany
Early Winter - 1986
Day: Twelve

The screams faded, not cut off, and silence settled over the room. Nagle shivered and rubbed her arms. We stood there silently for a long time, until we heard footsteps, slow and steady ones, thudding up the hallway. Our eyes had adjusted to the dim light thrown off by the bulb, letting us see the small entryway. The door handle turned slowly and the door seemed to flex strangely for a moment before the door handle slowly returned to where it started. There was a tapping sound at the door, a brittle sound like ice cracking.

"The floor..." Nagle hissed. I looked down and saw frost slowly spread under the edge of the door.

"Christ, he's right out there." Bomber breathed.

There was a scraping noise, like nails on a blackboard, and the door shivered in its frame.

Another liquid sounding chuckle, and footsteps slowly paced away.

"He's in the fucking barracks." Bomber said softly, one of the more unnecessary things he'd ever said.

"Knives?" Nagle asked.

"No. Knives won't do shit against him, trust me." I replied. My shoulder gave a dull throb at the memory of a chunk of ice sliding into the stab wound and a sucking sound right after it withdrew. I shuddered, and rubbed my shoulder.

"Then what?" Bomber asked.

"Eat. Two MRE's if you can handle it, and use the bathroom." I said, heading over to the box and pulling out two MRE's. Bomber and Nagle joined me, grabbing two MRE's out of their boxes and following my example by wolfing it down as quick as possible. Squeezing the peanut butter, jelly, and cheese straight out of the package. The bathroom was rank by the time we were done, but I figured it was better to be fully fed, bladder and bowels empty, than to just go into whatever we were looking at only half fed.

"Now we wait." Nagle said, sitting down on the bed. I sat down next to her, and when Bomber went to sit on the weight bench Nagle patted the bed next to her. She took both of our hands, and we sat there silently, in the dim light, waiting, watching the glow in the dark hands of my windup alarm clock.

Less than a half hour went by before we heard voices at the door. I let go of Nagle's hand and sat in the desk chair, Bomber moved over to sit on the weight bench. I watched as the handle turned after the key rattled in the lock, just waiting.

Oakes, Kebble, the LT, and Nelson stood in my doorway. The LT stared at me for a long moment, and I smiled at him, letting him see my broken front teeth.

"Where is he?" The LT asked, stomping into the dim room. "Sergeant Oakes, turn on the light." Oakes flipped the switch. The light didn't change, just a faint dim yellow. Weird. The LT grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. "Where is Sergeant Martins?"

"He's gone." I said simply. "If that was him in the stairs, with the rifle, he's just gone."

"Bullshit. You three did something to him!" Oakes yelled. "Your shitty Scooby-Doo costume might have fooled Private Logan, but we know that it was you three!" Her voice held the edge of hysteria, and I smiled at her.

"How much blood was in the stairwell?" Nagle asked. She smiled when the LT looked.

"Was it frozen?" Bomber added his smile when the LT looked at him. "It was frozen, wasn't it?"

"Grab them, take them down to the My Office." The LT snarled, letting go of me and turning around to walk out of the room. You could hear the capital letters in the way he said it.

When Oakes stepped forward and grabbed my arm I just went along with it, instead of doing what I wanted to do, which was break her fucking face in. She was pinching with her fingernails, deliberately digging them into me. Rather than actually respond to her, I just ignored her and it, staring at her like nothing was going on.

"Did you want something, Private?" I asked her. She yanked harder, and I just swayed slightly. "Yes?"

"It's Sergeant, asshole." She said. I glanced back, seeing Bomber and Nagle standing there behind me, and smiled at them.

When she pulled again I just curled my lip, then stepped forward, letting her know I was letting her tugging me toward her.

My door had deep scratches in it, through the paint, and into the metal. It was also covered with a thick layer of frost. Frost glittered on the walls, the lights in the hallway and the emergency lights were out, the lights on the other side of the doors were dim. The door to the stairwell, when we passed it, was closed and the stairwell was dark.

We took the front stairwell down to the orderly room, and when we left the stairwell the windows were dark where the snow had piled over the bottom floor. The temperature was pretty bad, our breath pluming out in front of us, but that was normal.

And it was better than the winter before.

The door to the outside, where I could clearly remember an axe-wielding maniac standing in the snow attached to a tether, was closed and completely blocked by snow. The windows were completely blocked by white, and I wondered just how deep the snow was. Skiers and tourists were probably enjoying the mountain below us, completely unaware of what was going on up here.

I briefly wondered if Tandy sometimes snacked on tourists.

We took the right, past the copy machine, and a left into the orderly room, where the Sergeant Major's office and the CO's office was. Sergeant Tee was sitting behind the Sergeant Major's desk, reading paperwork, and when we were marched in, he closed the manila folder he was reading and began to stand up.

Nelson already had the door to the CO's office open, grinning nastily, and waved us inside. The LT was standing up behind the desk, still dressed in his Class-A's, and I wondered just how bad they were starting to smell. He kept alternating between his Class-A's and a single uniform, and the uniform was starting to look pretty bad. When we came in, he was still looking out the window, not even bothering to turn around and face us.

"Take a seat in the chairs, we'll begin in a moment." He told us, tracing a finger across the glass.

I took the middle chair, Nagle on my right, Bomber on my left.

"Tie them down." The LT said, turning from the window and reaching out to pick up his Class-A gloves off the desk.

"No." I said, standing up. Bomber and Nancy followed smoothly.

"Sit down, or be put down." He smiled.

The only one not behind us was the LT, but it was pretty easy to keep track of them. Situational awareness was what it was called, and I'd always been good at it. Keeping track of your surroundings and the things in your surroundings that move, as well as estimating how they'd move.

Behind us, someone flipped the selector lever on their rifle, the click loud in the silence.

I tensed to turn around, my plan involving kicking the chair at Nelson, who was directly behind me. I'd take Kebble down with a strike to the throat, then turn and hit Oakes in one of her floating ribs twice, then finish off Nelson before moving on to the LT.

"What is going on in here?" Sergeant Tee's voice stopped me, and I heard Nagle exhale sharply.

"I'm going to question these three about the disappearance of two soldiers." The LT said, still pulling on the leather gloves as if the whole room wasn't poised at the knife's edge of violence.

"And they need to be tied up for that?" Tee wondered, coming into the office and standing in front of the desk. "So it is true that you had the three of them beaten to extract a bullshit confession out of them?"

"They're Soviet agents, we need to interrogate them to find out how many people they are working worth, to find out who is killing people in my barracks." The LT answered, clenching his fists in the leather gloves.

"Sir, nothing in the UCMJ requires these soldiers to submit to any type of interrogation outside of an MP station." Sergeant Tee snarled, stopping in front of us. "Nothing in the UCMJ give you the right to..."

"The UCMJ says what I say it says, Sergeant!" The LT suddenly bellowed, his face turning red. "Vigilance against agents of the Soviet Union is required in this unit!"

"Nagle, Stillwater, Bomber, return to your room." Sergeant Tee said. "The LT and I need to have a small talk."

"Stop right there." The LT snarled, "Sergeant, you don't want to try to countermand my authority."

"You do not want to get in a pissing contest with me." Sergeant Tee shot right back. "You're a pissant little Lieutenant with delusions of grandeur who can't even handle a Rear-D assignment." He glanced back at the three of us. "And I doubt that First Cavalry Division would have approved of you beating up three soldiers for some imaginary crime."

"I'm sure I'm a better judge of what goes on in First Cav than you are, Sergeant." The LT's tone was frosty.

The three of us were just staring at the exchange. You never saw an officer and an NCO going eye to eye.

"Since I've been with the Cav twice, once when you were still in High School, you're sadly mistaken." He turned slightly. "The three of you, go back to your room." He turned back to the Lieutenant. "We're going to talk about what's going on."

I turned around, smiling at Nelson, and pushed by him, deliberately shoving him with my shoulder, using my greater mass to knock him a step back. Nagle and Bomber followed me into the orderly room, and I kept an ear out.

In the stairwell, heading between the first and second floor, we heard the stairwell door open and boots thunder up the steps. We stopped on the landing and let them catch up.

Nelson, Oakes, and Kebble came up the steps, glaring at us, and stopped on the landing with us.

"The LT told us to make sure that the three of you get to your room all right." Oakes smiled. "He's going to arm everyone and put them into search parties."

"We'll find out where you're hiding them, and then your ass is grass." Nelson added.

"Whatever." I grunted, heading up the stairs. Fuck 'em.

They locked us in the room and we all three looked at each other.

"He's going to arm them." Nagle breathed.

"Fuck." I agreed.

Bomber grabbed the desk chair and drug it over to the door, wedging the chair under the handle so it couldn't turn and be used to open the door.

I had a bad feeling.